


Scarlet and Bible Black

by paraTactician



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-04
Updated: 2011-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-26 22:11:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/288446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>TT: One is not easily shaken from the broodfester tongues, John.<br/>TT: They are stubborn throes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

-rose?

There’s so much wrong with his voice. It’s clear and pure as blue crystal, an April birthstone; if you held it up to the sun it would throw dancing spots of colour on your wall. It has no cracks, no veins. It’s a child’s voice, still – a child who’s trying hard to be brave, to be a man, but who isn’t there yet and knows it. She runs her tongue along the inside of her teeth.

-rose, can you hear me?  
-um.  
-wow, this is really awkward, haha. 

She knows just how he’d scream. He’s never been hurt, not really, not like some of the others have, and that’s precious. You never forget your first time; it breaks you, breaks you inside, and you never really go back together. That first shattering note of a thing _undone._

-karkat says we shouldn’t talk to you.  
-he says we’ll make it worse.  
-but i think that’s really stupid!  
-i mean, not that karkat’s stupid, he’s really smart and his plans are great.  
-but he doesn’t know you like i do, rose. 

_No, John. He knows me better. He knows trouble, and you don’t. Get away._

-do you remember back when we started playing?  
-and you were trying to work out how to build my house up to the first gate?  
-oh man, we had like twenty grist or something, it was so crazy!  
-and i was just basically in this huuuuge panic because my living room was full of imps.  
-and they were getting that gross black slime on everything and messing with my pogo ride.  
-i don’t know what i’d have done if you hadn’t been there, rose.  
-you were just like, john.  
-john, stay focused. come on. it’s only an incredibly sweet pogo ride.  
-i’ve always wondered if the game knew which server players to assign, somehow?  
-i know that sounds really weird!  
-but if i hadn’t had you as my server player i’d have been so screwed, i mean seriously.  
-it would have been like... a screw party, of just all this being screwed happening pretty much all the time, and all the snacks have also been screwed.  
-uh, yeah.  
-i’m not as good at those as dave is.  
-but you know he’d just have made fun of me, he’d have been like oh man fuck this noise, imma go make a terrible comic that isn’t even funny, because i am a butt.  
-and jade would have gotten really upset, i think.  
-i’d have been all oh noooo and she’d have been all oh noooooooo and we’d just have got stuck in some kind of weird feedback loop.  
-or maybe she’d have done her spooky enigmatic knowing the future thing and been totally unhelpful, bluh.  
-but you were just right.  
-you stopped me freaking out, you were so sensible.  
-it was like you were totally in control, even if you did trash part of my house.  
-and to be honest i’m freaking out a bit now, rose.  
-so...  
-i don’t know, calm me down!  
-be the sensible one.  
-wow, if karkat heard this he’d say i was hitting on you so hard.  
-which i’m not!  
-that would be REALLY weird.  
-he’d say i was, i don’t know, turning pale for you or something.  
-but i just want my friend back.  
-...  
-rose, can you hear me?    
-JOHN, NO, WHAT THE FUCK.  
-GET AWAY FROM THAT MIC, YOU UNBELIEVABLE FUCKING MORON.  
-I AM DEADLY FUCKING SERIOUS, DROP IT. 

He is, too. She can hear real terror in his voice, terror for his friend, and she hisses a little with pleasure at the knowledge.

-I EXPLICITLY SAID –   
-i know, karkat, jeez! but i’m not just going to stick her away down here and ignore her!    
-YES, JOHN, YES YOU ARE.  
-THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING DO.  
-YOU ARE GOING TO STICK HER AWAY DOWN HERE AND YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING IGNORE HER COMPLETELY OR I SWEAR TO GOG I WILL CHAIN YOU TO ANOTHER, ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WALL ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FUCKING STATION.  
-ANYTHING YOU TELL HER IS JUST GOING TO GIVE HER MORE POWER, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?  
-SHE’S A MINDWITCH, JOHN. A BRAIN-RAPIST.  
-STARTING UP A FRIENDLY FUCKING CHAT WITH HER IS LIKE LEAVING YOUR HIVE DOOR UNSEALED AND THEN GOING FOR A LONG RELAXING SOAK IN THE GOGDAMNED TRAP.    
-we weren’t even talking, i mean she doesn’t say anything, i was just –

Their voices move out of range of the microphone, become faint fuzzing noises and are lost altogether. Silence trickles back down the walls. Rose Lalonde shifts in her chains so that the cold iron burns more fiercely against her wrists and ankles, and tries not to go to sleep.

* * *

In her nightmares she always escapes.

It doesn’t matter how; it never does, in dreams. She’s just free, free to whisper and slither down the dark tunnels of the station, toes brushing the floor, the ragged skirts of her dress grown impossibly long and fluttering out behind her like wings, free to sniff the cold metallic air and tongue her cracked lips and moan with the hunger of it.

One by one they try to fight. Karkat’s usually first; he runs at her screaming, eyes wild, sickles clenched in his fists, _hellbitch, I knew we should have fucking thrown you out an airlock,_ but it’s not real rage, it’s terror playing dress-up, and she’s not interested. She punches a shadow through his gut and up into his chest, lets it twist and rummage wetly for a couple of seconds as he gurgles in disbelief, then backhands him into the wall and sweeps on. She doesn’t even bother to watch him die.

John begs her to _remember who she is_. It seems only right that even his last words should miss the point. She stares into his blue, blue eyes, wide and scared behind his stupid glasses, and then drives a slim tendril through each one with a soft crack of glass and a squelch of jelly. How’s that for _humour_ , little prankster? He flops around like a fish on a hook, making high inarticulate noises, until she snaps her fingers and he bursts like rotten fruit.

She licks him off the corner of her mouth and keeps going.

Dave is waiting like a samurai, but the blade shakes and he’s _crying_ , really crying, tears are trickling down from under his shades, and she’s disgusted to think she was ever related to this creature, that any part of her ever loved him. She takes a minute to punish him, snakes of black ice finding every gate and weakness in his body and wrenching their way inside deliciously slow, and by the time he finally dies she’s confident he’s seen the irony, and happy that the thing left over no longer looks like her, or human. She drops it with a damp slap on the tunnel floor and drifts on, humming a tune.

Jade, strangely, never tries to fight. She doesn’t even try to talk. She just looks up at Rose with big, sad eyes, and alone of them all she’s not scared. For a second fury boils in Rose’s gut – how _dare_ this stupid little buck-toothed girl not fear her? – but then something like weariness takes over, and she cuts Jade in half at the waist with a single strike and is gone before the blood stops spurting.

That one always leaves her unsatisfied, somehow.

* * *

-so hey lalonde  
-imma paint you a picture okay  
-here we are you and me in this kind of crazy baroque laboratory  
-screens all up the fucking wall  
-tubes and shit everywhere  
-theres this holographic projection of some chick wearing a load of toilet paper basically just spazzing out in the middle of the room for no apparent goddamn reason  
-im this loudmouth white asshole whos sort of a jerk but also a really fucking incredible rapper  
-just imagine me with a buzzcut and youve pretty much got it tbh  
-you  
-now i know this is a stretch  
-but youre a massive black dude with these completely preposterous guns  
-i mean jesus youre built like a fuckin sherman tank  
-youve clearly done dick for the last year but guzzle whey powder and bench a rhino  
-so okay i get what youre thinking  
-whats my motivation in this scene  
-how should i deliver my opening line  
-but its cool  
-cause youre in a coma or some shit  
-like all laid out on an old fashioned ventilator with an oxygen mask  
-members of the international institute for gratuitous fucking product placement wandering round in labcoats rubbing their wangs on each others smart phones and grunting  
-btw our new model is fully wang compatible ladies and gents  
-nice crisp close up of the hp logo as jism splatters across the hyper sensitive touch screen  
-accidentally starting two text messages and a game of angry birds  
-nothing says buy our shit like bukkake right  
-anyway just when the youtube audience at home are like holy mother of christ wtf is this i could have watched the entire of jack sparrow by now  
-i kick this bitch off  
-get my fuckin flow on just tight as hell  
-start talking bout  
-like  
-what the fuck am i even meant to do  
-like i aint got shit if youre not here  
-i mean fuck  
-i just  
-im trying to make this funny but it aint coming  
-i cannot fucking cope with this at all  
-rose goddammit  
-nows the part where you say lol punkd  
-cmon quit this grimm shado witchalok crap and get your pallid ass back out here  
-ill tell you all my most dong packed dreams  
-ill make one up specially about how i fell in a snakepit and then got kind of prodded at by hundreds of long hard swords and then a rocket took off  
-ill make you a fucking cup of tea i dont even care if my balls shrivel up like sultanas  
-fucking smile at me  
-please  
-get up rose im dying i need you  
-come back for fucks sake

And something tiny trapped inside her lies down on the ground and howls for grief.

* * *

Days pass, probably. Little Rose, objective Rose, the Rose who _doesn’t_ get off on all the ways she’s going to kill her friends, notes that she no longer needs to eat. Shortly after that she takes a sort of inventory of bodily functions and realises with ice-water fascination that she’s not breathing any more; hasn’t been for God knows how long. Once that’s on the table she spends a relatively pleasant couple of hours distracted, unable to focus on anything but the way her chest isn’t lifting and sinking, the way if she forces the muscles to work and pull in a lungful of sterile filtered air it just feels weird and awkward ‘til she blows it back out; like putting a ball-bearing on your tongue and waiting for it to dissolve.

She is, officially, dead.

Well, not quite. Death is notoriously hard to define – the problem, of course, is how do you tell it apart from _life_ – but she seems to remember the cessation of consciousness is required, and she’s still conscious, even if she wishes she weren’t. But her body has stopped, and she can’t help feeling that’s a significant point on any downward curve you choose to draw. An axis has been crossed. y is less than 0. The jury’s still out on x.

Presumably the darkness is keeping everything in one piece. Perhaps it isn’t? Perhaps she’s going to _rot?_ Sit glumly on the cold stone floor of her brain while the blood curdles and goes thick around her, skin turns papery, eyes and organs crumple. She watched a documentary about forensics once. What order does it happen in? What goes first? How long before bits actually start dropping off?

They all come to see her sometimes, except Kanaya. Kanaya, Jade informs her sorrowfully, just can’t bear it. _I think it makes her too sad, Rose!_ Rose knows better. Sadness wouldn’t stop Kanaya Maryam. Disappointment’s another matter. They say you should never meet your favourite authors, and that goes double when they’re stapled to a wall, making noises like something blowing tar through a straw. The whole business is appallingly undignified. Kanaya wouldn’t like it.

Terezi’s a regular, though, which figures; _frequency of visits_ and _respect for Karkat Vantas’ leadership abilities_ are inversely proportional. She’s there nearly as often as Dave – chiding, nagging, mocking, goading. _Pathetic, Seer! They told me you were strong._ It’s a good tactic, a lot better than John’s, and were their roles reversed Rose thinks she’d probably be doing the same. She appreciates it. But it doesn’t work. What she really wishes is that they’d all just stay _away_ , because the thing in her is getting stronger and it’s getting smarter. She’s learnt to feel them, now, up there in the booth behind sheet steel and troll Plexiglas, even when they say nothing; bright coloured shapes that wobble and shine, swirly blotches of life on a dead black slide. Dave is a jagged scribble of oranges and cream and he makes her hungry. Jade is a chiming harmony, green and gold like Sir Gawain. And most often of all there’s the fizzing, crackling knot of angry scarlet that translates as Karkat. He never talks, never says a word, and if it wasn’t for her new party trick she’d never know he was there. But he is, every day, sometimes for hours. Math should have told her as much.

One space of time she wakes from winding an obsidian ribbon round Terezi’s slim throat and feels a new light, a sound-shade that’s not in her lexicon yet, and thinks: Kanaya! But it can’t be. It’s iron grey, hard to make out, and cold, and it hums. Vibrates: something electrical, a fridge, a computer, the low drone of cooling systems. It tastes like licking the top of a Coke can. And every minute or so – no, lazy, _every minute_ , sharp as isotopes – it flashes with colour so bright it hurts her teeth. Red. Then blue. Then back to red.

She’s not even sure it’s a person. But it’s new, so she has to try. The same way she does every time, she sends out a thought, the tiniest thought she can think, white and feeble like a new root from a bulb, nothing fierce or demonstrative enough to trip the alarms and drown her brain in black thrashing brine, and she thinks:

 _help me_

And a voice – crisp, a little nasal, plainly surprised – says _okay_.


	2. Chapter 2

She’s sitting in a chair, straight-backed, her hands folded demurely – a word that puzzles her the moment it appears – in her lap. She’s wearing what some tiny, invincible girl-centre of her being notes critically as a very nice dress. It has a high waistline, and ribbons, and lacy bits. She knows what those are called, just not right now. It’s purple. She likes purple. She smells smoke, and flowers. What the _Hell_ –

She goes to stand, fluffs it somewhere in the early stages, collapses to her knees on fleecy carpet and throws up, a lot. God, it’s amazing. Hundreds of years ago she used to have a morbid fear of being sick, but now she can only look back and smile, in between racking heaves, on the follies of her youth. How could anyone not enjoy something so earthy, so vital, so alive? Dead girls don’t vomit. Every clench of her gut is a tiny benediction. She is pleased she still knows the word _benediction._

She’s on about her third stomachful when it occurs to her that nothing’s coming up. That stops her mid-spasm. The pale blue wool between her splayed hands remains pristine. Her mouth tastes foul and there’s an acid burn at the back of her throat, but that’s it. She could swear –

Someone’s watching her. She kneels up, wipes her mouth delicately with the back of one hand though she knows there’s nothing there to wipe. Rose Lalonde: all class, all the time. Then she looks cautiously over her left shoulder.

A boy of about her own age is sitting in a wooden chair, elbows propped on its carved arms. His fingers are steepled under his nose like he’s Gendo Ikari – does anyone actually sit like that in real life? Evidently yes – and he’s regarding her dispassionately through a pair of pince-nez which gleam in the firelight. One lens is red; the other is blue. Candy-corn horns jut from black hair flattened close to the skull: two pairs, major and minor. Narrow face with high cheekbones and a lot of forehead, all tapering down to a pointy chin framed between the starched white fins of an impressive wing collar. Dark riding-jacket and a small frill of lace at the throat, like a Regency clergyman. He has grey skin, and a neat row of fangs that only look very slightly goofy.

“Is this some religious thing?” he asks.

“Vocal training,” she says. “Opens the airways; clears phlegm. Helps me hit top F.”

He nods, like this is a perfectly satisfactory answer, which is a little worrying. For starters, she’s an alto. She stands up gingerly, careful not to tread on her skirts, and surveys the room: the fire in the hearth, dark oak furniture and little glass ornaments twinkling on the shelves, big picture windows looking out onto blackness.

“Why are we _here?_ ”

He gives a little one-shoulder twitch that probably wanted to be a shrug when it grew up. “Fuck if I know. I told your brain to take us somewhere safe. Where’s here?”

She eases herself back into the chair and busies herself with fussing and smoothing for a second or two before she answers. “It’s from a film. A film I loved when I was... very young.”

“Huh. What kind of film?”

She makes herself look him dead in the pince-nez and says, “It was about a princess, who discovers she can do magic.”

Neither of them move. The fire in the hearth crackles realistically.

“That sounds like a really shitty movie,” he says thoughtfully.

“As a matter of fact, it won three Academy Awards,” she snaps.

A window explodes. Glass rains down on the carpet in flecks, and some _thing_ – a huge, pulsating tongue of shadow, slick and wet – gropes blindly into the room for a second before flopping down against the wall and lying there like a vast slug. Black juice seeps from its underside and into the carpet. Somewhere far off she hears music.

“Yeah,” he says, “try not to feel. It likes feelings.”

“The warning is a little late, but appreciated nonetheless. I shall remain as composed as the circumstances allow. May I ask your name?”

“Why?”

“You’re in my head. I’m sure it must be etiquette.”

“Sollux Captor.”

“Rose Lalonde.” At this point he should really get up and kiss her hand, but she’ll let it slide this once.

“La _londe,_ ” he tries, and grimaces. “Bit... floaty.”

She scans him; wrists like twigs, elbows like garden trowels, hunched slightly forward and down in his chair because he doesn’t know how to sit in front of anything that doesn’t have a keyboard.

“Well, we can’t all be as robust as _Captor,_ ” she says coolly.

He’s still thinking. “Lalonde. Hang on. Pinkscarf! Fakemage Pinkscarf. You blew up Eridan’s rig.”

“Guilty as charged. I will accept any punishment that does not involve the perpetuation of that absurd nickname. Something with bamboo slivers, perhaps.”

He snorts, and the narrow shoulders shake for a moment. “Fuck no, funniest thing I ever saw. He was all stomping around like _ah, my coy princess of darkness, wwait and I shall make you mine._ Couldn’t get the cloak to billow properly, had to kind of twitch it with one arm and hope no-one noticed. Fef and TZ fucking lost their shit.”

It’s strange hearing a voice other than her brother’s say _TZ_ , and a spark jumps a gap somewhere. She’s still much too slow. It’s like trying to think through a heavy cold. “You’re the hacker, aren’t you? Kanaya mentioned you.”

“Oh, _great._ ” He flings his hands up suddenly, and the movement’s so fierce and sharp it doesn’t even look showy; it’s a neural flare, a flash of tension. She thinks of red and blue lights. “Thanks for that, Kanaya, thanks. Yeah, I’m _the hacker_. Like the trap, or the gaper. Just another piece of kit to keep around. Wonderful. Did she dig really _deep,_ go for some insights? I’ve got a fucking speech impediment, too, that’s crucial, can’t get at what makes me tick ‘til you’ve wrapped your pan round _that_ little nugget.”

“She also said you were very smart,” Rose says mildly.

“Well, no shit.” He flaps a hand in dismissal. “I’m incredibly fucking smart. I’m so smart it’s not even funny. That and half a caegar gets me a pod of coffee, you know? It’s not like being smart ever did anyone any _good._ ”

She knows what he means a little too much to agree. “That’s patently ridiculous, and more than slightly teenage. I thought Alternia was a military culture? Even the most hide-bound and hierarchical military places a high premium on intelligence. Not to mention the fact that none of us would have survived this idiotic game for as long as we have without using our heads at least as often as our specibuses.”

“Nah.” He slumps back in his chair, the tension gone again. “You’re talking about _not being stupid._ I’m talking about being _smart._ Not the same thing. I mean, look at Kanaya, okay? She’s not stupid. She’s smart _enough_ that she’s not going to trip on her own feet and fall on her ass, or get ganked by a fucking Juggalo. KK, too, useless fucking nookstain most of the time, but he’s not dumb. But they’re not _smart._ And it’s _specibi._ ”

“It most certainly is not. _Specibus,_ like _omnibus,_ is a dative plural serving as a singular. Pluralising it over again would be hypercorrection, leaving the admittedly inelegant _specibuses_ as our only option. Am I right in assuming that the membership list for your highly exclusive Smart Club remains fixed at a single name?”

“Wow, guess the fuck again, _racist._ Eighth declension Alternian nouns in – _us_ take nominative and accusative plural – _i,_ geminated to – _ii_ before a sibilant or semivowel, paradigmatically _lusus, lusii._ And no, there’s two of us, when TZ’s not too busy going scarlet for random aliens and chalking sloppy hearts all over her block wall like a wiggler.”

Rose feels a sudden and profound need to be catty. “You, of course, disdain quadrants entirely as unworthy of your intellectual majesty.”

She’s hoping for an eye-roll or a snort of contempt. What she gets is the sight of Sollux Captor sinking a little further into himself and looking fixedly at his bony knees.

“No,” he says quietly, “I mostly disdain ‘em because they’re all dead.”

Something flaps at a window, and the panes rattle. The fire cowers in the hearth.

“I’m sorry,” she says eventually, on the basis that there really is no other way out of this one.

He looks up. “Nah, fuck it. Like I say: you can be smart, or you can be happy. The glorious future of Alternia was gagging on a bulge even before that seadweller shitbag hopesploded the Matriorb, so it’s not like my threadbare genes were in the greatest of fucking demand to start with. And all the rest of it’s a big shame globe daisychain dreamt up by the pigment farms to keep teen catgirl shippers from going totally fucking berserk and culling half the planet. Let’s talk about you. What’s the plan?”

Rose blinks, archives as much of this comment as possible for future processing, and spreads her hands in mock-apology that isn’t entirely mock. “I hadn’t got much further than _don’t kill everyone,_ to be perfectly honest. That’s why I called tech support.”

He doesn’t laugh, just nods. “Just in time, too. Fucker’s reaching critical mass.” He jerks a thumb irritably at the broken window, beyond which she can just about see the night churning across itself in damp folds. Someone is playing the flute, a long way away, and much too fast. “I’d give you another day at the outside.”

“How do I get rid of it?”

He eyes her thoughtfully. “That what you want to do?”

“No, I’d rather my consciousness was devoured entirely by a psychic atrocity of unimaginable malice. Do we really have time for stupid questions?”

“Lalonde, I never ask stupid questions. One more time. Are you sure you want to get rid of this thing?”

“What’s making you think I wouldn’t?”

His mouth quirks. “More like it. Okay, this thing’s living in your brain. The only way to stop it is to kill it. Killing things in your own brain is risky. You kill the wrong part, you’re a vegetable, or you’re not you anymore.”

“Rather like tampering with the registry.”

To her surprise, that gets a crooked but entirely honest grin, and he smacks one hand on the arm of the chair happily. “Fuck! Yes. Delete the wrong line and whoops, your high-end husktop’s a fucking sopor tray, fit only for the shittiest of clown pies. Next time get a better OS.”

“But if I don’t evict my tentacled room-mate _tout de suite,_ I will effectively cease to exist.”

“No-oo. Not _quite._ You’ll exist, you just won’t... well, put it this way, you won’t care too much about terrible Earth princess movies for little kids any more. Or, you know, people.”

“I will become, body and soul, a puppet of the Furthest Ring.”

“Yeah.”

“Upon which my first action will be to break free of my confinement and attempt to kill everyone on this station, a small but vital demographic which incorporates not only all of my friends, but, I am assuming, all of yours. And, of course, you.”

“Yeah.”

“So if Karkat Vantas were here, he would be shaking you by the lapels of that splendid riding-coat and howling his most inventive obscenities directly into your nostrils. The word _bulge_ would figure prominently.”

“KK’s bulge never figured prominently in _anything._ But yeah.”

“Because there is absolutely no way you should be giving me any choice in this matter.”

He looks pained. “Jegus. Of course you get a fucking choice! It’s your brain. What kind of asshole do you think I _am?_ ”

“Sollux, are you allowing my _personal preference_ to dictate whether or not everyone you love dies slowly and horribly?”

“Nah,” he says, and grins again, and slots his fingers together and pushes them sharply outwards with a noise like someone biting down on a mouthful of dice. “’Cause if you get out of those chains, I can fucking take you.”

She stares at him. He just smirks.

“My God. I can’t decide whether your misplaced self-assurance is adorable or obnoxious. No, I tell a lie, it’s obnoxious. I would _erase_ you.”

“I’m a high-echelon psychic, grimdark girl. I’m not going to come at you with a stupid bit of sharp metal like a certain nubby-horned nookmunch who shall remain nameless. I’m going to hit you with my brain, and it’s covered in spikes and it weighs a fucking ton.”

She cups a hand to her ear. “What’s that? Oh! The eldritch monstrosity says psychics are particularly delicious.”

“No it fucking doesn’t, it’s an eldritch monstrosity. It says a lot of absolute bullshit no-one can pronounce, but which if translated would be pretty much _me beastie, me eat you now,_ in all caps and like 280-point bold underline.”

“The monstrosity is offended. It says it will blow up your computer before it feasts on your soul, just to irritate you.”

“My computer is _made of bees._ I’d like to see it fucking try.”

She can’t help it. She splutters with laughter, and the windows burst.

Shrieks and howling from outside, chittering noises like a flock of bats as the darkness surges in, lashing with feelers and sucking the heat from the air; the fire dies with a wet sizzle, the only light is the flicker of scarlet and cobalt as it lances from Sollux’s eyes and up, burning, shredding off little wisps of black that flutter like damp cotton; he’s out of his chair, glasses in one hand, face contorted in fury, yelling something.

“Oh, you want a fucking _fight,_ do you – ”

She jumps up wildly and there’s a door, the front door to her house, stark white and completely out of place in the middle of a panelled wall. She darts across and tries the handle, and it clicks open with just the catch and the weight it always does, or did. The room behind her is a shrill storm of insanity, tendrils whipping and slashing, deep and dreadful voices murmuring things she knows she doesn’t want to hear. The stench of salt and wet sidewalks is dizzying. Sollux has his scrawny arms flung wide like an evangelist, blue cherry fire punching from his eyes into the swelling cloud of ink and hunger, but he might as well be throwing matches in the ocean; _nothing_ can stop this creature, and Rose knows that, because part of it is _her_ –

She grabs the back of the high collar and pulls, and to absolutely no-one’s surprise he’s as light as a bag of straws, she drags him a full three stagger-steps back before he turns angrily to follow her, clamping the spectacles back over the knife-edge of his nose. They run like children, headlong, heedless, and Rose is gratified to find that imaginary dresses don’t catch at your legs and trip you up the way real ones do. Up a flight of stairs she half-remembers, across a sweep of shingle by a reservoir she definitely doesn’t, through John’s bedroom and out the other side even though she’s damn sure John’s room doesn’t _have_ another side, she should be, she knows every brick of that fucking house. And behind them, much too close, the crunching, splintering, unpleasantly _wet_ sound of her mind being torn apart. She wonders if she’ll ever play the violin again.

Somewhere along the way she realises she lost her grip on the troll boy’s collar and now she’s holding his hand, three of his long fingers clutched in her fist, tugging him along. She may not know where she’s going, but she knows the way. The world ends behind them, and they keep running.

Eventually, as they lunge up another flight of stairs, feet skimming the treads without really making contact, the delirious speed of dreams, he says, “This is bullshit. Turn left.”

They’re coming up to the door of her bedroom, and for a second she’s seized with irrational panic that she might have left it in a mess.

“There _is_ no left,” she says shortly. “The house doesn’t – ”

There’s a left. All her life that wall’s been blank, but now there’s a solid industrial steel door flush with it, a shiny red button dead centre in the metal. Sollux smacks it with his free palm and it starts to grind open. Rose risks a glance behind them. Shadows are winding hungrily up the stairs, and she knows how they’ll feel: knows the blissful cold that will sink through her limbs, the numb surrender to the coils of something far older and stronger and more beautiful than herself; the taste of decay in her throat. Sollux’s fingers are hot and sweaty in her clenched hand. Clearly she has a good imagination.

Then they’re slipping free and he’s seizing her wrist instead, tight enough to hurt, and pulling –

The door’s shut. They’re standing in a short featureless corridor of dark grey metal, white tube lighting and a perforated floor that clangs underfoot, like a space station in a movie. At one end is the door with the red button, now closed and showing no inclination to open again, thank God. At the other is an identical door, but this one’s button is blue. Sollux lets go of her arm altogether and strides over to it, thumbs the button impatiently. Rose fixes her eyes on the red door, willing tiny wisps of treacherous darkness not to come trickling up and around its edges.

The blue door opens, and Sollux sets his narrow shoulders like a man about to go on stage.

The second they step through, his Regency garb blinks into an admittedly more practical outfit: grey jeans and a black T-shirt, the latter adorned with a large Gemini symbol in mustard yellow. Rose manages to fight down a brief spasm of disappointment. The pince-nez swap out for ordinary glasses, frameless ones with the same distinctive particoloured lenses. To her fascination, her clothes change too; presumably the mind of Sollux Captor has no processing power to waste on maintaining an Empire-line evening gown. She’s abruptly clad in a long grey skirt and a black T-shirt like his own, although the symbol’s different. She tugs on the hem and peers down at herself.

“I’m a Sagittarius,” she says, puzzled, “not a Pisces.”

“ _Fuck!_ ” says Sollux with unexpected force. The symbol disappears, and is not replaced. He doesn’t like making mistakes, then. Predictable, but nice to have it confirmed.

They’re standing in a vast and gloomy hall, built from some ash-grey material that’s too dull to be metal and too featureless to be stone. The ceiling is somewhere far overhead, lost in shadows. Great thick tree-trunk pillars, spaced at regular intervals, soar upwards and vanish into the same darkness. There’s no way this can ever have been a real room, even on an alien planet: it’s too big and too _blank,_ there’s nothing at all to suggest function, or purpose, or inhabitation. Even the door they came through has disappeared. It’s just a space, bounded by walls. It looks as though the designer’s going to come back later and add texture mapping, flaming torches, and a band of belligerent orcs.

“Be careful,” she says, “your imagination is running out of control.” Her voice doesn’t echo, which is strangely unnerving in a space this size.

“Shush,” he says. He’s not looking at her; he’s standing tense, almost on tiptoe, craning his neck like he’s trying to sniff the air.

She shushes, and immediately hears it. Very low, very soft: a hissing, whispering sound, like steam leaking from a pipe in some distant corner, sibilant and disturbing.

Almost as one, they move a little closer together.

For a few seconds, nothing stirs, and then a single shadow flickers across the far wall and is gone. It looks exactly as though someone just dodged past a light source behind them, except this room doesn’t have any light sources yet; the dim glow in here doesn’t come from anywhere, it just _is._ She looks down at her feet. No shadows there.

“Oh, fuck,” Sollux says, very quietly. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Sollux – ”

“No. That’s _impossible._ Psychic contagion doesn’t _work_ like that, you can’t – you can’t just _jump a fucking gap,_ you need an interface – ”

“Sollux,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady, “I think it can go anywhere I go.”

“But my shields – you have no fucking idea, even my _defences_ have defences – ”

“Yes. And you let me straight through them.”

He breathes out, a long, shuddering breath, and turns to face her.

“Right. Okay. Okay. It’s cool. We can do this. I don’t fucking care what this thing’s got, _no-one_ beats me in my own head. Not any more. I will not – Jegus. Come on, we’ve got to move.”

“ _You’ve_ got to move. Aren’t you listening? Anywhere you take me, it can follow. I’ll go back through the door, I don’t suppose it cares about you, it just wants me – ”

“If you go through that fucking door it will be like a snowball falling in a fusion reactor. Trust me. My pan’s built like a FLARP dungeon, even a cosmic horror is going to have its work cut out getting through some of this shit. I can buy you time.”

“I don’t _want_ you to buy me time!” she says desperately, and hears far off the slithering sound of something wet and cold.

“Tough. My brain, my rules. If you get to dress me like something out of Peta’s fucking awful yaois, I get to save your ungrateful ass. Plus I’ve got a plan. Now stop feeling, you’re getting it excited.”

“Don’t you dare tell me yaoi is a troll word too.”

“Sixth declension masculine, turns feminine in the plural. We made your universe, remember? Come on.”

* * *

They hurry down corridors as grim and dreary as anything in the ruins of the Veil. She glances left and right at shadows, sees metal, cogwheels, chains, locks. The imagery’s as subtle as a brick. _Keep out. Genius at work._ Sollux strides into some private blizzard, shoulders hunched up and forward, head down, hands in pockets, ploughing along like he expects the air itself to put up a fight. She doesn’t ask where they’re going: it’s a stupid slack question, one of those things you say just to say something, like _nice weather we’re having_ or _how’s your day been._

Instead, she says, “The inside of my head was more or less an assortment of memories, oddly jumbled though they were. Why isn’t yours?”

“You care about more stuff than I do,” he says, without turning round.

There are things we say that have no meaning; their only purpose is to be heard. _Hello. Goodnight. I love you._ The technical term for these is a _phatic utterance._ She bets he doesn’t know that one, and saves it up.


	3. Chapter 3

Eventually they duck through several doorways in quick succession and come into a room that isn’t grey. It’s a perfect cube of the same weirdly flat material Rose saw earlier, about the size of her own bedroom. One pair of facing walls is bright scarlet, the other is royal blue; the floor is a deep and rather pleasing Imperial purple, and the ceiling is yellowy-gold. The resulting clash is absolutely catastrophic. She tries not to look up.

Sollux has heaved shut a huge vault door in the red wall through which they entered, and is busying himself with a bafflingly complex locking system of cogs, dials, pistons, springs, bolts, and cranks, which reminds Rose of puzzles she used to solve in picture-books as a child. She takes the opportunity to size up the room. It’s almost entirely empty: there’s a desk (bare), a chair (uncomfortable-looking), and, on the blue wall left of the door, a set of small framed photographs hanging in two neat rows. Five frames: two on the top, three on the bottom.

Intrigued, she sidles closer, sparing a glance at Sollux’s back, which is hunched over a set of particularly tiny cogwheels low down on the door, his spine jutting between his shoulderblades like electric cable under duct tape. He’s swearing under his breath. Another few seconds, then.

The pictures are all head-and-shoulder portraits of trolls, which surprises her a little, although she doesn’t know what she was expecting – favourite strings of code? Great moments in kernel development? The three on the bottom row are all immediately familiar: Kanaya, looking politely interested if a little amused; Karkat, scowling; and in the middle, Terezi, fangs bared in her usual horrific parody of a warm and friendly grin. The two on the top are both girls, and Rose doesn’t recognise either of them. They’re both very pretty, and both have impressive hair. The one on the left has spectacular curled horns, like a ram’s, and an almost imperceptible smile. The one in the centre has horns which are... well, sort of horn-shaped, really, Rose supposes, and a slim gold tiara on her brow, and is beaming with utter delight.

“ _That_ should fucking hold ‘em,” says Sollux in satisfaction, and Rose spins neatly around but can’t really disguise where she’s standing. He looks at her, then at the wall, and then smacks himself violently in the forehead with one hand.

“Oh, fucking _Hell_. I knew I couldn’t bring you this far without some shit dribbling out through the cracks. Stupid lousy useless blocks, what the fuck did I even put them in for if they’re just going to cave first time some random alien gets past the outer fucking bailey? One leaky valve and suddenly we’re all splashing around up to our Goddamn knees in secret sewage and everyone’s pants are ruined. _Jegus._ ”

“The discovery that you have friends,” she agrees, “has entirely squashed any faint hope I ever nurtured of respecting you. If I’d known I was going to stumble onto filth like this I’d have stayed at home. I hope you’re suitably ashamed of yourself. Who’s this? She’s gorgeous.”

He hesitates, and she can see him gauging whether it’s worth the fight. Then something happens behind the glasses, and he makes a kind of hopeless snorting noise – half anger, half amusement – drags the chair one-handed away from the desk, and flops into it with the graceless, right-angled resignation of a clotheshorse collapsing.

“Feferi,” he says. “She was.”

“Your matesprit?”

“Jegus, I thought girls were _subtle_ about this kind of stuff? You’re worse than TZ. _Appleberry, the court demands a base update!_ I don’t know. Not my field. We were getting there, maybe.”

“What happened to her?”

“Eridan fucking Ampora happened to her,” he says tightly.

She thinks back. caligulasAquarium. Dark purple and a problem with his labiovelar approximants. The One With The Royalty Complex.

see i got a lot a experience bein nobility so ill let you knoww if you got a shot in hell at cuttin it pinkscarf

“Then I think I must have underestimated him badly. He came across as an arrogant, overprivileged moron. I had no idea he was genuinely dangerous.”

“He _wasn’t,_ ” Sollux mutters, staring at his hands. “He was a fucking idiot. It was all my fault. I didn’t think – that fucking stupid _science wand,_ I mean, that’s such a lot of bullshit, how do you even – what the fuck was that thing _made_ of?”

Two more pieces slot together, embarrassingly late, and Rose bites her lip. Seers are meant to be _good_ at jigsaw puzzles.

“The science wand that Kanaya made him? She – I was under the impression that was a joke.”

Sollux looks up at her and for half a second he’s so hollowed-out she wants to die.

“If it was a joke,” he says, “it wasn’t fucking funny. I’ve never gone up against anything like that before. I don’t know what the Hell kind of juice it was running off. The first time round I handed him his globes, so I just assumed – oh, fuck. I’m such a stupid asshole.” He jerks his head away angrily. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset!” he snaps. “I’ve just got better things to do with my time than take a leisurely guided tour of scenic Screwup City, population Sollux Captor. Let’s just – ”

“Who’s this?” she breaks in, nodding at the second portrait.

He _flushes_ , then, he doesn’t have a body but it still happens, she sees his face turn strangely sallow, and that tells her something useful about troll shirt colours, and it also makes something tighten a notch or two at the base of her throat.

“For fuck’s _sake_ , Lalonde! Do you really want the whole catalogue? I’m a Goddamned liability. I’m a shitty psychic, and a worse troll. Every time I – every time I _like_ someone, I fuck up somehow, and then they’re dead and I can’t fucking save them, I’m too late or too slow or too weak and I _never save them_ – ”

The last word bites off in a gasp, and he chokes, and jack-knifes sideways with sudden and terrifying force. The chair topples and spills him onto the floor like a heap of sticks, jagged and agonised; his feet scrabble uselessly in tiny pedalling circles, and one long-fingered hand clutches at the strange smooth plane under him like he’s trying to claw it up and get at whatever’s beneath.

She’s down on her knees by him almost as fast. “Sollux! What – ”

His back arches, his hands brace on the floor, and he makes a desperate whining sound, high and unbearable. Then he goes slack and starts coughing. Yellowy droplets spatter the glossy purple of the floor. She reaches out to touch his shoulder and he spasms away as if from a red-hot iron, rolling over onto one side and then onto his back, gasping. Runny mustard has dribbled from his nostrils and down across his thin lips, which are twisted in a kind of rueful grin. The glasses have stayed on, somehow.

“Ha,” he says weakly, and coughs again. “Fucker’s getting smart.”

“Oh, my God. _Feelings._ ”

“Yeah. Thing’s living off the land. The second I access a memory, it weaponises that shit. I just got Dismal Fucking Failure right between the eyes at eight hundred metres per second. Stung like a bitch, too.”

“This is absolutely ridiculous. None of this is even your responsibility. I appreciate everything you’ve done, but it was my mistake, and I won’t see you hurt for it.”

“Shut up and give me a hand. Worst thing it could have done was give me a real fight. I’m going to throw the book at this lobster-looking motherfucker. It’s going to rue the day it tried to piss in Sollux Captor’s head.”

“You are aware that you’re bleeding from your nose.”

“I don’t give two rubs of a barkbeast’s bulge where I’m bleeding from! And anyway, it’s not real blood, it’s just my body’s cute little way of saying _hey, douchebag, shit’s not 100% okay over here_. And my body can go fuck itself, I’m busy. Help me up, my legs are sulking, traitorous fucks.”

“Sollux, you have no idea how powerful this creature is! You keep talking about it like it’s just some _animal_ , some kind of fanged horror-movie predator with a yen for cheerleaders lost in the woods, but it’s no such thing. It’s a _god_. It’s magic. It’s what Eridan hit you with, but worse. It’s an Emissary of the Furthest Ring and it’s using the inside of my head as a munitions depot. It’s old, and it’s strong, and it’s very, _very_ smart.”

He spits blood onto the floor and this time the grin is genuinely dreadful. “Not as smart as me.”

She hadn’t known before today that it was possible to despair of someone so entirely that you want to kiss them. “Oh, for Christ’s sake – ”

“Rose, look. I know my limits, okay? I’ve had them repeatedly fucking dropped on me, I’d have to be pretty stupid not to. I know I can’t fight it. But _you_ can. You’re both running off the same battery. It’s living in your hive and reading all your books and trying on your clothes, but you still have right of ownership! You can kick it out. But you need me to show you _how_ , or you’re going to get turned into grubsauce in two seconds flat. Trust me. I promise I’m not going to fuck this up.”

“I didn’t for a moment suppose you were,” she says quietly.

She stands, grips the proffered wrist – her thumb and forefinger enclose it just neatly – and heaves. He staggers upright and slumps back into the chair; smears absentmindedly at his mouth with the back of one hand, regards it critically, and grimaces.

“Right, here’s the thing. I can’t leave. The second I leave this room I hand over my brain, and if that thing gets behind the wheel here we are all of us fucked in every orifice we have, and a few we don’t. All I can do at this end is frag bits as they pop up. To kill it you’re going to have to go back into the unbelievable shitstorm that used to be your thinkpan, and you’re going to have to do it on your own. So we need to teach you mind-war.”

“Don’t I get a chair?”

“What?” He looks down at himself, up at her. “Oh, fuck! I didn’t think – Jegus, how rude can you get, here – ” and he starts to lever himself back to his feet.

“Sollux, I was _joking_. I’ll sit on the desk.”

He wavers, as though trying to work out whether she’s joking about joking, until she comes over and swings herself neatly onto the edge of the desk, legs dangling, one knee almost brushing his. Then he falls back awkwardly and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Uh. Okay. Let me think about this. Mind-war’s basically pretty simple. Imagine you’re in a swordfight. How d’you win?”

“I have no idea,” she says dryly. “I generally use darkling energies spawned from the womb-like void of intelligences vast and uncaring to wrench my opponent’s soul from their fragile shell and cast it wailing into the abyss, and look where _that’s_ gotten me.”

He inclines his head as though in formal acceptance of the point. “Yeah, fair. I generally use my incredible mutant brain to blow shit up like it’s fourth after periapsis, and look where that’s gotten _me_. But pretend you’re being your asshole of a moirail – ”

“Excuse me?”

He hesitates. “You know. Strider. Pale dude with the shades? TZ’s flushcrush, God help us fucking all.”

“Dave Strider,” she splutters, “is _not_ my moirail.”

The high brow clenches into furrows. “Really? Huh. Shit. Way he talks, I figured – no, fuck it. Pretend you’re him, if you can fucking stand it, and you’re squaring off against someone who isn’t a psychic. KK, maybe. How do you play it?”

“From my limited acquaintance with swordplay, both experiential and fictional,” she says guardedly, “I gather the essential strategy is to defend oneself against attacks until one perceives an opportunity to strike one’s opponent decisively.”

“Okay, kind of dry, but yeah. Mind-war’s the same. You keep your shields up till you spot a chance to do some damage. The harder the other dude comes at you, the more he’s going to leave himself open, and eventually he’ll fuck up and you can ruin his shit.”

“That’s exactly what I said, but less precise and with more swearing. You and Dave really would get on famously.”

“ _Fuck up_ , see under _shut the_. If you’re getting in a mindfight you need four things, okay? First one’s what we call a cloak.”

“Sorry, Professor, I’m still a little bewildered as to the ontological valence of all this theory we’re falling down. Are you simply persisting in the endearingly masculine habit of using martial analogy to describe situations which are, in fact, wholly unrelated to combat in any form? I’ve heard my brother announce his intent to ‘kick the shit out of these dishes’ and ‘punch laundry in the face’ before now.”

He shifts irritably in his chair and sniffs up another bead of blood. “Okay, don’t try and fucking haze me with your _ontological valence_ , save it for someone who’ll gawp. Ontology is currently a leaky fucking pail and you should forget about it. We are literally sitting in my fucking head. If I want us jumping over the green moon on a rainbow musclebeast, for whatever Goddamn stupid reason, that’s where we’ll be. Once this conversation’s over you’re going toe-to-toe with a chaos elemental that’s older than time. If you want to see that as a tea party in the duchess’ parlour, go right the fuck ahead! It’s your brain. _Personally_ , if I’m winding up to kick some ass, I’m going to think in terms of big, heavy boots, but maybe that’s just me.”

“I think I understand. You talk with swords, then, and I’ll turn them into sugar-tongs as my girlish sensibilities judge appropriate. You were saying about a cloak.”

“What? Oh, yeah. Your cloak’s the most basic thing; never get in a fight without it or you’ll get torn to fucking shreds. It’s your armour, or your, like, napkin, or whatever. It’s the first thing you learn to build. I took half a sweep perfecting mine; you’ve got like five minutes, so best of fucking luck with _that_.”

“Please, don’t try to spare my feelings.”

“Fuck feelings,” he says shortly, “no time for ‘em. Your cloak’s what stops the other guy just reaching in and turning your brain upside-down first thing he does. Better you are at keeping shit under wraps, better your cloak’ll be. How are you with secrets?”

At that she just _has_ to laugh.

“Okay, sweet. That’s a good sign. Use it. Make your mind do whatever it does when you’re not letting someone see something. Close off. Imagine you’re playing – shit, do you guys have impaler?”

“What?”

“Hand of cards, you bet on who’s got – ”

“ _Poker,_ ” she says, “yes.”

“Right. Play that, but with your brain. Second, you need a centre. This one’s hard to talk about without it sounding like the most incredible load of slurry, like one of Nitram’s fuck-awful special-flower self-belief manuals, _you are a child of the universe_ – fat fucking lot of good they did him, poor kid – but your centre’s your still point. It’s the part of you that stays objective and doesn’t just do a fucking half-gainer off the balance beam every time stuff goes pear-shaped. Sound manageable?”

“So far you’ve told me I can increase my chances of survival by being secretive and emotionless. I’m starting to think I may have found my _métier_.”

“Don’t get too smug,” he warns. “Smug’s an emotion too.”

“I’m fairly sure it isn’t.”

“ _She was feeling smug._ Q E fucking D. Third, you need what for some dumb archaic reason is always called a _staff_ , but basically just means a weapon, you can make it a teaspoon if you want. It’s what you hit the other guy with, when you get a chance. Pretty self-explanatory. You can use a bunch of stuff for that – hate, fear – but anger’s the best. Good psychics always have a lot of it to spare.”

“ _When they ask how I died, tell them: still angry._ ”

He cracks a grin. “The psionic’s creed.”

She thinks about anger, then. She thinks about white text, smug and taunting; she thinks about her friends, trapped in a game they could never have won; about everything it took away from them, everything it never let them have.

She thinks about her mother, and about dying.

Something hurls itself against the great vault door with a hollow boom, and the walls shudder. The light in the room seems to gutter like a candle, the air is greasy and slick, and then two bony hands are gripping her shoulders painfully. Sollux is out of his chair and she’s staring straight into his stupid gimmick glasses. She’s not sure how his face got so close without her noticing. It all went dark, for a moment.

“No,” he says, with an effort.

She blinks stupidly at him.

He pulls back a little, but doesn’t take his hands away. A single mustard tear trickles down from under the scarlet lens, fat and sticky.

“ _Anger,_ ” he says shakily. “Not rage. Whatever that was, you need to shut it the fuck off. You can’t _ever_ lose control. Cloak and centre, remember? You want the cold anger, not the hot kind.”

She could snap his arms like dried spaghetti. She stares transfixed as the drop of blood slides across the high ridge of one cheekbone and begins to track a course toward the corner of his mouth. If this was real she’d be able to smell him. She wishes she could. She swallows, unpeels her fingers from the edge of the desk, and manages, “I’m not sure I quite appreciate the distinction.”

He lets go, steps back, keeps watching her. “Poetry,” he says, “is a lot of horseshit.”

“...I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me. Troll poetry, human poetry, all of it. All this junk about aesthetics, form over content, like something’s magically truer if you say it nicely. Hey, look at me! I can take any old bunch of grubmulch about, like, _clouds_ , and _feeling sad_ , and as long as I make it rhyme they’ll queue up and tell me I’m a Goddamn visionary. That I go _straight to the riddle at the heart of existence_. Said perplexing riddle being: some days I feel great, some days I don’t, same as everyone. It’s all hot air and misleading fucking expectations. The only thing that goes straight to the heart of existence is math. Everything else can fuck off.”

“Oh, dear. You’re not really one of these do-or-die essentialists, are you? If you can’t write a program for it, you’re not interested? Poetry isn’t about prioritising form over content: quite the reverse, it’s about _using_ form to access layers of content too deep and intangible for scientific – ”

He’s smirking again. “Okay, okay, stop. You’ve got it. If I’d told KK his romcoms were a steaming heap of hoofbeast dung, he’d have yelled at me and called me a fuckass. Hot anger’s no use. Cold anger wins arguments, and mind-war’s basically an argument with SFX.”

This time she lets herself smirk back, and awards him a fractional bow. She was just about to drop a couple of particularly obscure French theorists from the 1970s, and the effort of retrieving them has brought a measure of clarity as refreshing as ice-cubes. “Nicely played, Mr Captor. My thanks. The fourth thing?”

“The crown. Again, don’t ask, no fucking idea, but it’s important. Crown’s about perception; being able to see things the way they are. If you don’t have a good crown, the other guy gets to write the rules of engagement, make you see stuff however he wants you to. Crown lets you cut through all the garbage, basically.”

With every point on this list Sollux has become more animated, more interested. He hasn’t bothered to sit back down or wipe the blood away; he’s now pacing on a short track, chopping at the air with one hand for emphasis, and his whole body seems livelier. He’s just as tense as ever, but it’s a kind of happy tension, born more of enthusiasm than of discomfiture. A high wire, singing in the wind. On other people’s ground, she realises, he’s defensive, grouchy, even sullen. Give him something he _understands_ , and the sun comes out.

“This is becoming more complicated by the minute,” she says, and means it.

He pivots to face her and looks positively eager. “Yeah, but a lot of it comes naturally. Cloak and centre for defence, staff and crown for attack, pretty much. We’re – trolls – we’re always taught to think of it in terms of quadrants.”

“Imagine my surprise.”

“Shut up. It helps, as a model. Cloak’s about moirallegiance. Centre’s auspisticism. Staff’s kismesis, obviously, and crown’s matespritship. Pity you guys shot yourselves in the stupid pink foot by only acknowledging one quadrant, you could have learnt a bunch.”

She doesn’t want him to stop talking, just yet, so she says, “Kismesis I understand, I think. And I can see why moirallegiance would be associated with defence; that’s what a moirail does, am I right? Defends you against the world?”

“Defends the world against you,” he says, “but yeah, that too. Your cloak’s like your moirail; it keeps the inside stuff inside and the outside stuff outside. Auspisticing is about balance – not running to extremes, not letting shit get out of hand, so, centre. They’re both the calm quadrant, if you like.”

“And matespritship for... perception? That seems a little counter-intuitive. I thought love was blind.”

Sollux taps a long finger on the side of his nose confidentially, and the gesture’s so ludicrously solemn she only just bites back a giggle. “Rookie error,” he says. “Matesprits are _all_ about seeing. That’s the point. You see through their bullshit, past the walls, and you pity what you see. Or that’s how it’s meant to work, anyway, but I mean, what the fuck do I know. The day I explain quadrants is the day KK starts teaching people how to code, and coincidentally also the day the universe dies screaming.”

“I think most of it already did.”

“Yeah, well. Goes to show. Anyway, that’s the basics.” He does the knuckle-crunch again and she winces despite herself. “Let me teach you a couple of tricks.”

* * *

When she goes to leave his little command centre he shows her to the door, for all the world like it’s the end of a party.

“Be careful,” he warns. “You were right, that thing’s no fucking pushover. And you’ve never done this before.”

“Have you?”

He pulls a face. “Technically, no. Not properly. But I was trained for it. It’s what my bloodcaste’s designed for. Yellowbloods are Alternia’s psychic corps, that’s why we’re built like fucking fuse-wire. All of this – ” he flaps a hand at his torso – “is pretty much just a shitty pintle mount for _this_ ,” and he points at his head.

“Is that really how you see yourself? A weapon on legs?”

He shrugs, the same weird jerky half-shrug she saw before. “We’re all machines when you get down to it, right? You do your job, and then you either blow up or rust over. No shame in it.”

“Then why did you decide to help me? That wasn’t your _job_.”

He doesn’t say anything for so long that she starts to wonder if he actually doesn’t know, or if he’s just weighing his options. Then he says, “I’ve had someone mess around with the inside of my head before. It’s not much fun.”

“No,” she agrees. “It isn’t.”

The great vault door grinds open, and she braces for trouble, but she’s staring down the same short airlock corridor they arrived in, with the red button shining at the far end. She looks at him and he grins with bloody lips.

“Leaky pail, remember? Go fuck their shit up.”

She snaps a little mock-salute. “Aye-aye, sir. I’ll come and find you on the other side, when I’ve dealt with my sushi infestation.”

“Yeah?” he says, suddenly uncertain.

“ _Yes,_ ” she says firmly. “I owe you a pod of coffee at the very least. You stay there and troll the barricades. I’ll be fine.”

She makes herself walk confidently into the passageway, and with no real body it’s easy; no legs to shake and give her away, no heart to pound or guts to churn. Halfway along she turns to look back. He’s peering from the half-open doorway hesitantly, his face serious, blue and red shades shining like tiny oval screens.

“Rose?” he says. “You can join the Smart Club, if you want.”

“I assumed there’d be an exam,” she says lightly.

“Nah. We’re too smart for exams.”

She smiles. “You don’t care about any less stuff than I do, incidentally,” she says. “You just keep it all in one place.”

He stares at her for another couple of seconds, then shuts the door.

She stands in the little corridor, alone again, and looks down at herself. Black shirt, grey skirt. Too close for comfort. She pictures a white squiddle-skull and a pink scarf, brushes them hurriedly away. No. Listen to what he told you. Take someone’s advice, for once in your life. Work from the ground up.

The cloak is about protection. She has to be someone who can keep themself on the inside, and the world on the outside, and a wall between the two. She has to be someone who can take a hit and not show the pain, who can grit their teeth and keep moving. She has to be someone who will keep her safe.

It’s not hard when you think of it that way. She looks down at herself again: black jeans and scarlet sleeves, and a cracked record to cover her heart. Better already.

The centre is about poise, and calm, and dignity; grace under fire, a flat refusal to give way to turmoil or excess, to be any less than perfect. She winds a deep violet sash around her waist and knots it firmly so the ends trail almost to the floor; breathes slowly in and out, once.

The staff is for courage and for anger, but more than that; she needs _reason_ , order, a torch to drive chaos squalling back into its caves. Thought, not feeling. Cold anger. _Whatever else you do, win the argument._ She smiles, and stretches out a hand, and she’s holding a white cane with the head of a dragon, and she can see the tiny seam where that head will lift up and away with a whisper and a gleam of steel. Let’s see how the Furthest Ring stacks up against the Cruellest Bar, shall we, Neophyte?

And last she needs a crown. True sight, head-sight; the power to see things neither as you want them to be, like a child, nor as someone else wants them to be, like a fool, but as they _are_.

The answer doesn’t actually surprise her, when it comes. She fits the hooks over her ears, pushing her hair clear, and snugs the lenses down onto her nose and cheekbones, and watches as the world goes that little bit more three-dimensional, and also kind of purple, but that’s fine, in the circumstances.

She probably looks really stupid, but she absolutely does not give a fuck.

She presses the red button and the door hums open and something like the salt spray of the ocean leaps up and slaps at her face. There is only darkness, now. She’s standing on a ledge in space, and above and below and around her the black waters churn and foam. Impossible faces coalesce and vanish so fast there’s only the quick bite of panic, no time even to be properly afraid, and the moment they’re gone your mind tells itself that _nothing_ could look like that. Whirlpools of ink and teeth, miles across, slurping and roaring like a draining bath. Things that pulse and bulge like bodies beneath a sheet. Scribbling lines and tumbling shapes and blisters that swell from nowhere. The word _chaos_ , she knows, originally meant _void_ or _chasm_ , and she thinks she’s looking right into it.

A voice like a hundred voices says, deep and melodious, _Rose. Rose. We knew you would come back._

“Just to fetch my coat,” she calls into the storm, and tightens her grip on Terezi’s cane. “Please, don’t get up.”

 _You are nothing without us. We know you as none other. We love you as none other. Come to us. Give us all that you are. Give in to the surging of the tide. We can make you strong, and proud, and beautiful. Let us help you. Let us take you._

“Bitch, you couldn’t take me on my _worst_ day,” says Rose Lalonde, and jumps into Hell.

* * *

When she wakes up she’s cold. She’s lying on something hard, and a damp chill is soaking up through her skin and into her bones; her body’s curled round itself instinctively to conserve heat, and that must mean she has heat to conserve. She starts to shiver, and wants to laugh.

She clambers shakily to her feet. Back in her prison again. She’s stark naked, and can’t help an awkward glance up at the windows of the observation booth, already half-turning away, but they’re dark and unoccupied. Is there anyone up there? No way of telling; her brain can’t reach out like that any more. Everything is very quiet. There’s no sign of her clothes. There’s also no sign of her _chains_ , except for two long dark blurs of what might be dust smeared up the wall behind her, and two matching bands of gritty grey powder round the white skin of her wrists. The metal underfoot is scorched and blistered, but icy to the touch. She does a quick tally of some favourites: _aquiline, mesothelioma, agglutinative, parsnip._ All intact.

She is a little pale thing in a cold dark room, and that is all. She feels exhausted, and light-headed with relief, and terribly lonely.

The metal iris in the corner unfurls without protest at her approach. She’s somehow not surprised that between them Karkat Vantas and John Egbert managed to alchemise solid iron manacles, but forgot to lock the door. She climbs the stairs, flinching slightly at each press of her foot on the freezing treads. The filtered air pouring from the ceiling-vents is like standing under a cold tap, and her teeth start to rattle gently. She would happily kill for a fluffy bathrobe, a pair of slippers, and a mug of hot chocolate.

On second thought, perhaps _would happily kill_ is one expression she’ll strike from her idiolect.

The booth is lit by the glow of LEDs – chains and seams of them, red and blue – and turns out to be occupied after all. Sprawled out flat in the middle of the floor, arms spread, feet turned outward, breathing, is a troll boy in jeans and a Gemini shirt. She can’t tell if he’s asleep or unconscious, but either way he looks annoyed about it. A pair of swimming goggles is discarded nearby, which is sort of weird.

 _You can be smart, or you can be happy._

She glances round, sees a bank of computers in the corner half-covered by some sort of tarpaulin. She drags the latter free. It’s heavy and dusty, made of some kind of leathery material that’s smooth and not too cold to the touch, and it smells a little of oil and a little of old books. She drapes it carefully over the recumbent Sollux, tugging it up as far as his shoulders. Then she lifts the edge and crawls under it too.

It’s like snuggling up to a radiator. There is no way the body of one skinny teenager should possibly be able to kick out this much heat. Sollux Captor’s metabolism must be built like a starship engine. Rose gives a small involuntary groan of pure joy and presses as much of herself as she can against him, twines one leg up and over his, worms an arm across his chest until her hand cups his shoulder; purrs. Then she brushes her dry lips against his dry cheek. He smells of Tab and static.

This boy is a walking nightmare. He’s a scarecrow frame holding up a brain that could punch a hole in space. He’s as cuddly as a caltrop and as approachable as a landmine. He thinks love’s a chemical accident, happiness is a myth, and _relax_ is a dirty word. He has twice as many bones in his body as he should and not one of them is romantic. He sees people as puzzles, and all he really wants is one that’s complex enough to keep his interest. Rose’s stomach is heavy and fluttering with an awful contentment.

She needs to warm up, and he needs to cool down. By the time they’re both awake again their temperatures should just about have equalised. That’ll be nice.


End file.
